Introduction and my first post - a hummingbird

Hi all,

I just joined BPN today !

A little bit about myself. When I first took up photography as an hobby, it was still a film world. It was about a year or so ago I started taking photographs again after a decade of not picking up a camera. By then, as you all know, digital photography has become the norm. After I got my hand on my first DSLR, I realized that, with an auto-focus camera, perhaps I could try my hand on bird photography. Well, that's how I started.

Anyhow, if it's OK, I would like to share with you one of my recent shots and would appreciate any comments to improve my photography. I'm new so I primarily am here to learn from you guys.

I'm not sure if this's the forum to post this photo as I'm not sure what it means by "hand of man". I took this photo at a sanctuary that happens to have a feeder at the entrance. So perhaps that is not exactly 100% in the wild? :)

Some info about this photo. I shot this with a Nikkor macro 105 f2.8 VR on a Fujifilm S5, ISO 100 at f4 and 1/1000, natural light, hand-held. Although I mentioned it's AF that got me into bird photography, this one was shot with manual focusing. So, a lucky shot :) I stood a few feet from the bird and this is one of the results. As you can imagine, this final image is a crop of the original full shot.

C&C welcome and will be appreciated !!

Welcome, Desmond
An image is posted in this forum if there is a "hand of man" element present such as a feeder, fence post, barbed wire, etc. as well as any captive bird. Since this one was at a sanctuary near a feeder, it's ok to post it here. It's always good to give a little information about where or how you photographed the image as well as the technical data. One thing that would be helpful is to post a larger size (within the guidelines) of your image. The small image here is too small to tell anything about and unless you know to click on the image for a larger view, will probably go unnoticed. With that, the head of the hummer is very sharp. Nice blurring of the wings but I feel that the DOF may be too shallow and the rest of the hummer seems to blend in to the BG a bit too much. Hummers are fascinating to watch and a real challenge to photograph. If you get a chance to return, I'd certainly be trying many different angles and techniques to get more images.

Thanks for the comment, Lana!

About the photo size and the need to click to see the larger size, I finally found out why my pic showed up that small: I clicked the "attachment" icon on top of the message box. I edited my first message and reposted. It seems to work better now. Not that it will make it a better photo :o